In order for machines and equipment to remain operational, the machines and equipment must be repaired and maintained by people. As the complexity of the equipment increases, the amount of knowledge someone must have to maintain and repair the equipment increases. Equipment is repaired because it is more economical to repair the equipment than to throw it away.
Some machines and equipment currently in use are complex and expensive to operate. Often, the machines and equipment may store data that indicates specific problems the machine is having, i.e., paper is jamming in the machine. Sometimes the location of the jam is also indicated, i.e., roller 1, roller 2, or roller 3 etc. Some sensor information regarding the condition of the machine is sometimes stored. An understanding of the manner in which the machine operates will be helpful in repairing the machine. Typical repair technicians are unable to use the above stored information in its native form to repair the machine and consequently will spend additional time to repair the machine and/or phone more experienced personnel for help.
In order for machines and equipment to remain operational, the machines and equipment must be repaired and maintained by repair technicians. A disadvantage of the prior art is that maintenance calls are scheduled chronologically, when the need for servicing of a machine or piece of equipment should ideally be determined by how various components of the machine are currently operating.
Another disadvantage of the prior art is that a complete diagnostic analysis of the equipment is not obtained. Since, often only certain operating conditions (forms of stored data) of the equipment are analyzed automatically or by human interpretation.